My Pillow CEO Banned From Twitter For Claiming Trump Won Election
My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell has been permanently banned from Twitter.
This article is more than 2 years old
Former President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of election fraud have had some unfortunate, if not downright scary, ripple effects. From the deadly Capitol riots on January 6 to GOP leaders perpetuating the false claim that Joe Biden stole the election, the fallout of Trump’s behavior has paved the way for numerous consequences. Luckily, certain social media platforms aren’t having any of it. Twitter has started cracking down on misinformation-peddling accounts, even going as far as to ban Trump from the platform in the days following the riots. Now, the CEO of My Pillow has also found himself banned from the site.
ABC reports that My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell is now banned from Twitter permanently. According to a Twitter spokesperson, Lindell helped circulate false information, a move that Twitter ultimately deemed was a direct violation of its new policies. The specific rule he broke was its civic integrity policy, which officially went into effect last September.
Lindell founded the now-huge pillow manufacturing company back in July 2009, patenting a poly-foam pillow he called My Pillow and going on to sell over 40 million pillows. He grew the company from fewer than ten employees to over 1,500. He has since earned the nickname “the My Pillow guy” and become an ardent supporter of Trump. He attended the president’s inauguration in 2017 and became the campaign chair for Trump’s Minnesota reelection campaign.
My Pillow CEO Lindell has perpetuated false information before, perhaps most notably when he publicly promoted oleandrin, a plant extract that he maintained was a viable cure for COVID-19. He has made misleading claims about the extract’s effectiveness at combating COVID symptoms, a move that makes perfect sense when you find out that he currently sits on the board of a company that makes oleandrin.
After Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election, My Pillow CEO Lindell was just as outraged as most of the rest of his party. Heck, he even helped finance Trump’s exhaustive, exhausting efforts to overturn what was deemed a fair election. Lindell was not quiet about his desire for Georgia voters to face prison time, nor did he hold back when suggesting that Trump impose martial law in seven states.
Regardless of whether or not you feel Twitter’s decision regarding the My Pillow CEO is justified, it will be interesting to see what kind of precedent this sets for future violations. There will undoubtedly be consequences and many are already unhappy with Twitter’s move, but it’s still too early to tell how this will impact the platform in the long run. We will likely see more of the fallout from this and other inevitable bans in the near future.
The increasingly popular conservative alternative to Twitter, Parler, was shut down a few weeks back for many of the same reasons that Twitter banned Trump and now My Pillow CEO Lindell. Many websites are now fighting misinformation on a massive, seemingly coordinated scale, adopting a zero-tolerance policy that will hopefully help the truth shine a bit brighter without nuggets of false information clouding or tainting it.
What do you think about all of this, though? Let us know!
